DAMIEN HIRST

BACKGROUND• Born 7 June 1965• English artist, entrepreneur, and art

collector• Prominent member of the group known

as the Young British Artists• Dominated art scene in UK in the 1990s• Troubled childhood, arrested twice • Absent father, strict mother• Studied Fine Art at Goldsmiths,

University of London• Discovered by Saatchi after many

turndowns after his warehouse exhibition

SUCCESS• In 1991, Charles Saatchi had offered to

fund whatever artwork Hirst wanted to make, and the result was showcased in 1992 in the first Young British Artists exhibition

• The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living £50,000

• In 1995, Hirst won the Turner Prize• ‘For the love of God’

INFLUENCES• He went to an exhibition of work

by Francis Davison, staged by Julian Spalding at the Hayward Gallery in 1983. Davison created abstract collages from torn and cut coloured paper which, Hirst said, "blew me away", and which he modelled his own work on for the next two years

• Just before Christmas 2002, Strummer died of a heart attack. This had a profound effect on Hirst, who said, "It was the first time I felt mortal.” Death expericence

• Influenced by Bacon, exposed next to him in an exhibiton ‘dirty painters who wrestle with the dark stuff. He's complicated. It's not essentially about formal skill or technique or dexterity. It's about belief. I believe! And the struggle, the sense that you somehow grunt your way though it by sheer will. That's what's inspiring to me, alongside the sheer bravery of confronting the dark side, the shadows, the full force of the human psyche.’

• I’ve always liked series. I remember looking at Robert Motherwell’s painting when I was young. ‘Do you know ‘Splashes by the Sea’? I thought that was great.   You get some sort of security from the repetition of a series. If you say something twice, it’s pretty convincing. It’s more convincing than if you say it once. think it’s also an implication of endlessness, which kind of theoretically helps you avoid death’

• ‘Science seemed to be getting people’s attention and art didn’t, so I hitched a ride on that.’ also partly came from David Cronenberg’s film ‘Dead Ringers’. science museums, natural history museums

• Jeff Koons’ Hoovers, and all that Neo-Geo stuff and Kurt Schwitters. I was thinking, ‘What would Kurt Schwitters be doing if he was alive today?’

THEMES• While a student, Hirst had a placement at a mortuary,

an experience that influenced his later themes and materials.

• Theme of death, use of dead animals• Hirst takes a direct and challenging approach to ideas

about existence. His work calls into question our awareness and convictions about the boundaries that separate desire and fear, life and death, reason and faith, love and hate

• “I’ve got an obsession with death … But I think it’s like a celebration of life rather than something morbid.” theme of vanitas: celebration of life and death

• vanitas and beauty, death and rebirth, and medicine, technology, and mortality.

symbolic of the inevitability of death and the transience and vanity of earthly achievements and pleasures; it exhorts the viewer to consider mortality and to repent.

IT’S A WONDERFUL WORLD, 2001• Butterflies and household gloss on

canvas• 1829 x 1829 mm | 72 x 72 inc• Victorian tea tray• Church windows: intended

comparability to stained glass found in religious settings

• morbid beauty• Hirst himself admits his “obsession with

death”, but argues that his interest in the fragility and shortness of life is “like a celebration of life rather than something morbid.”

• intricate geometric patterns that have the look of a view through a kaleidoscope

• spiritual symbolism and transcendency of the fragile creature that is the butterfly

• The butterfly motif was first used by the ancient Greeks to depict Psyche, the soul, and then in early Christian imagery to symbolise the Resurrection

NOBUYOSHI ARAKI• Born May 25, 1940 • Japanese photographer and contemporary

artist• Araki was born in Tokyo, studied

photography during his college years• Many of his photographs are erotic; some

have been called pornographic• Arguably Japan’s greatest living

photographer, and certainly its most controversial

• Nobuyoshi Araki consistently challenges artistic and social conventions in postwar Japan by referencing the country’s rich history of restraint, commercialism and eroticism

SENTIMENTAL JOURNEY